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Monday, June 17, 2013

I’ve been hooked on The
Blood Spattered Bride for quite some time now, one of those films that
always seems to call me back. Every now and then a feeling of Déjà vu will
leave me longing to return to that old family mansion that radiates with
ancestral significance and a haunting history of mariticide. The men of this
house seem to die young. Nearly every generation for two-hundred years, the wives seem ambivalently intent on murdering their husbands shortly
after their weddings, a curse that began when Mircalla Karnstein joined the
family and was entombed with the dagger she murdered her husband with on their wedding night. This
curse led to a type of stigma towards the women of the family, with the result
that all the family portraits of the women be buried away in the cellar like
some kind of shameful family secret.

Still in their wedding clothes, the current
master (Simón Andreu) and his new
young bride, Susan (Maribel Martín of A Bell from Hell), will be arriving to
the aforementioned cursed house to spend their honeymoon, deep in the forested
countryside. He hasn’t been to this place for years, but the servants are still
employed, and everything is made up for a pleasant stay for the newlyweds. Shortly
after the consummation, and the loss of Susan’s virginity, a ghostly bride begins to
visit Susan in her nightmares, offering her an undulated dagger, imploring her
to use it on her husband for defiling her.

Spain’s take on JosephSheridan Le Fanu’s
classic novella, Carmilla, is a damn
fine Eurocult horror with some beautifully evil ambiance (no surprise there)
and rather twisted sexuality (no surprise either). It’s very well made and
doesn’t feel cheap enough to call exploitation, even if it is, and it actually
succeeds at being pretty creepy. I’m hesitant to call this "erotically charged"
horror, since I feel that something erotic should be capable of sexual arousal,
but the sexual situations are twisted and awry, to say the least. The rape
scene, awkwardly placed at the beginning, gives it a bad initial taste; the
relationship between Susan and her chauvinist husband is not romantic, and the
meetings between Susan and Carmilla feel more tragic than kinky since Susan is
seduced and dominated and more or less a poor victim of the female vamp. It’s
obvious this one is trying to disturb and unease rather than supply cheap
sexual thrills.